For those who weren't living in Hampton Roads back in the late 1980s, here's the nutshell version of how these campground Christians came to harm their son:
Karen and Michael Diehl arrived in Virginia Beach from Idaho in 1986 with their 17 - you read that correctly - kids in tow.
Four of those children were their offspring.
The others were adoptive children with a variety of disabilities.
The Diehls lived in a school bus in a campground. Their only visible means of support was a patchwork of government checks and charitable handouts.
You'd think such a bizarre living arrangement would have raised suspicions.
You would be wrong.
The Diehls were media darlings. For a while you couldn't turn on the local news or open a newspaper (including this one) without finding a fawning story about the big-hearted family.
All that changed when Dominick ``Andrew'' Diehl died and the public got a horrifying peek inside that school bus.
Andrew was severely disturbed and disruptive. Yet some social service meatheads tossed this fragile child to this overloaded family, who then drove cross-country offering parenting advice to anyone who would listen.
The abuse Andrew Diehl suffered at the hands of his parents is almost unspeakable.
Testimony at the trial of his parents revealed that the boy had been shackled, usually naked, to the floor of the bus for more than a month before his death as punishment for his antisocial behavior.
Even though testimony in the trials showed that Karen Diehl administered most of the boy's beatings, and forced Andrew to eat his own bodily waste, it was Michael Diehl who received the harshest punishment: a first-degree murder conviction and 41 years behind bars. He remains in prison." -
http://poundpuplegacy.org/node/20300
fuckin obviously not... so now we're all a lil freaked out, bitches be crazy
